"The practitioners of this famous art proceed, in general, upon the following fundamental, that the corruption of the senses is the generation of the spirit; because the senses in men are so many avenues to the fort of reason, which, in this operation, is wholly blocked up."

"All endeavours must be therefore used, either to divert, bind up, stupify, fluster, and amuse the senses, or else, to justle them out of their stations; and while they are either absent, or otherwise employed, or engaged in a civil war against each other, the spirit enters and performs ...

"Here it may not be amiss to add a few words upon the laudable practice of wearing quilted caps; which is not a matter of mere custom, humour, or fashion, as some would pretend, but an institution of great sagacity and use; these, when moistened with sweat, stop all perspiration, and by ...

"For, it is the opinion of choice virtuosi, that the brain is only a crowd of little animals, but with teeth and claws extremely sharp, and therefore cling together in the contexture we behold, like the picture of Hobbes's Leviathan, or like bees in perpendicular swarm upon a tr...

"They hold also, that these animals are of a constitution extremely cold; that their food is the air we attract, their excrement phlegm; and that what we vulgarly called rheums, and colds, and distillations, is nothing else but an epidemical looseness, to which that little commonwealth is very su...

"The first ingredient toward the art of canting, is, a competent share of inward light; that is to say, a large memory plentifully fraught with theological polysyllables, and mysterious texts from holy writ, applied and digested by those methods and mechanical operations already related:...

"Others rather believe there is a perpetual game at leap-frog between both, and sometimes the flesh is uppermost, and sometimes the spirit; adding that the former, while it is in the state of a rider, wears huge Rippon spurs, and when it comes to the turn of be...

"Remark your commonest pretender to a light within, how dark, and dirty, and gloomy he is without; as lanterns which, the more light they bear in their bodies, cast out so much the more soot and smoke and fuliginous matter to adhere to the sides."